Here’s a few mistakes made by many self-professed SEO wannabe’s – has your web developer/SEO expert told you any of the following? If so, might be time for you to say goodbye and hire a decent Hong Kong web design company such as 65UNDER (applause for gratuitous self promotion)
1. Links Will Increase Rank
This is by far the most common mistake made by someone who decides to manage their own website. It’s not the amount of links, but the quality and relevance of the link. In very general terms, what this means is that 1,000 incoming links from low page rank sites with little or nothing to do with your sites content, is probably less use than 1 link from a highly ranked site on a similar subject as yours. At 65UNDER we’ve had a site rank #3 on google for a highly searched for keyword term with NO incoming links at all.
Common SEO Mistakes
2. Site Validity
Having your site validate in W3C standards does NOT help a lot with SEO, only in the way the page displays for the user, and even then having a “W3C Valid” site doesnt guarantee anything – the proof, Google.com doesnt validate and Google themselves say site validation is of little importance with a tiny percentage of sites actually validating under W3C standards
3. Keyword Frequency
May website newbies read about keywords and litter their site and content with keywords. This not only makes it difficult reading for your visitors, but can actually penalise you and in extreme circumstance, get you on Googles dreaded spam list. Depending on who you listen to and what you read, a general guide is to have 7-8% keyword frequency i.e for every 100 words your keywords are repeated 7-8 times. This is a very general guide so don’t go counting words and adding or deleting keywords to arrive at that quota.
Web Design Tips Hong Kong
4. Guarantees of #1 or 1st Page Rankings
Be very weary of any companies or individuals that guarantee you they can get you on the first page of Google. To prove this point lets say Company ABC is offering a guarantee and tells you they can get you on page 1 of google for the keywords “Don’t Trust Me”. What if 11 companies with the same set of target customers and keywords come to this company? Hint: There’s only 10 results on the first page. If you dig deeper under the “guarantee”, you’ll find some small print because, and this also according to Google, no company should offer a guarantee of getting you on the first page
5. Hits Are Not
The very novice Hong Kong web designer can be fooled into thinking how many visitors a site has. A hit is measured every time a file is called from the server, so if your home page has 100 images, this means 100 hits, not counting all the other files that are usually not seen by the average visitor. Note this if you are intending to advertise on other websites, if they even mention “hits” it usually means they have no idea of what they’re doing, or they’re trying to trick people – neither of which are qualities you want in a business you intend to do business with.
6. Visitors
Related to above, even visitors don’t necessarily mean money. If you adopt black-hat (illegal/trick) techniques to get people on your site, it doesn’t matter if 1m visitors arrive on your site because if they come across something they’re not looking for they’ll click off within a second or two – think about the last time you clicked on that hot pic of Jessica Alba only to find yourself on the next Nigerian Goldmine home page, or something totally not what you were expecting. You can find this “Bounce Rate” in Google Analytics, which will be given as a percentage, and is the number of people who click on to your home page and click off without visiting another page – of course, you need to make sure you install Analytics on every page for this to be accurate.
More to come…
